How Do You Know Where To Start?
Everything has a beginning but it is not easy to pinpoint where that actual beginning is. What possessed me, a shy, introspective person - a person so shy that she is quite comfortable not talking to actual other people for days at a time - to open a store? Most of my working life has been spent in service or retail kinds of jobs, with the exception of my first job. That job was as a stuffer in a soft-sculpture factory. When I told my mother I was stuffing pink flamingos for a living she thought I was working for a taxidermist. It was a fun job in many ways, although very dead end. After all, how many life-size pink satin flamingos does the world need? I worked there with a friend from college, both of us drop-outs. Other employees floated in and out, but mostly is was just us and the owner. We listened to the radio and lived for 3:00 when Book Time read by Dick Estelle came on. While we laughed and sang and smoked like chimneys the rest of the time, we maintained absolute silence while Dick read to us, only speaking during commercials. And now that I think about it, it was very strange that we smoked on the job. If the world doesn't need an abundance of pink satin flamingos, it probably needs even fewer that reek of tobacco smoke.Alison eventually moved to New York so I actually got promoted to assistant manager. Considering that the most people that ever worked at this place was four, including the very hands-on owner, the promotion was about as dumb and meaningless as it sounds. And I wasn't even very good at it! We did a monthly inventory, and I regularly forgot to multiply the number of stuffing bales by their weight which lead to many scenes with the owner. These scenes always depressed me because I quite admired her and wanted to earn her respect. Here's a tip: people tend not to respect you when you burst into tears every time you are criticized. Laura, the owner, was quite a dynamo - she'd gotten her start by selling at craft fairs, filling her VW bug with her mostly avian stuffed creations and driving from venue to venue. She was a genius with a sewing machine. When she got married she made herself TWO wedding dresses. One of them she designed herself and the other was a copy of the one Lady Diana wore when she married Prince Charles. Now Laura knew exactly what had propelled her into a designing career: when she started high school her parents informed her that they were no longer going to buy her clothes; she was going to have to pay for them out of her allowance. Back then it was very possible to make ordinary clothes for less than they cost in a store (see if you can guess how old Laura must be now!) so she started sewing her own clothes and had started making money with her machine almost immediately. Laura was the first self-employed person I had ever gotten to know. I did have a friend in grammar school whose father was a sculptor and later, in high school, a friend whose mother was a fiber artist but I never got up the courage to ask either one of them how you turned being a sculptor or a fiber artist into a job.
Although I wasn't so competent at some of the paperwork, I did learn a lot about wholesale pricing, setting up a production or assembly line, and what the paperwork should be doing. Fortunately, I was quite gifted (though sloppy) at mathematics in high school so I wasn't actually intimidated by the paperwork - just careless. Thus I began to understand the process through which a person turned a skill into a livelihood. And that is one beginning point that ultimately led to Ubeadquitous.
